Andrea Vaccari is a research assistant at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology.
He is also a graduate student at the Politecnico di Milano and the University of Illinois at Chicago.
David Orban is the cofounder (together with Leandro Agro’ and Roberto Ostinelli) and chief evangelist of OpenSpime, a new technology startup that was born to accept the challenge proposed by Bruce Sterling of creating spimes, a new class of sensors that project in space and time (thus spimes) and enable individuals as well as businesses and institutions to sense, track, and understand the environment around us. OpenSpimes are GPS-enabled sensors that are aware of their environment and that allow to collect ambient data thourgh the use of open APIs and protocols.
I had the pleasure to meet David two weeks ago in San Diego, during the ETech 2008 (see my previous post). In that occasion, he briefly interviewed me about the New York Talk Exchange project that I presented at ETech on behalf of the Senseable City Lab, and he then published the video on YouTube. So here it is:
Today in a MIT CSAIL seminar, Dr. Ramachandran Ramjee presented his ongoing research on smartphone-based monitoring of traffic and roads conditions. The research is motivated by a need to go beyond GPS-based monitoring which proved to be ineffective in complex environments like those of developing countries. These environments (R.R. showed a video of an intersection in Bangalore, India) are characterized by an heterogeneous mix of vehicles, fatigued road pavement, liberal honking, continuous stop-and-go traffic, and so fore.
I just got back from San Diego, where I attended the ETech 2008 and presented the brand new New York Talk Exchange project, and I would like to offer my insider round up of the best of the best of the conference.
This year the focus was on “the brand new tech that’s tweaking how we are seen as individuals, how we choose to channel and divert our energy and attention, and what influences our perspective on the world around us.” In other words the eye was on the alpha geeks, as Tim O’Reilly calls them, who are working on ideas that are still in a early development phase, far from the publicity of the mainstream media and blogs but that will truly change our lives when they (or we) will hit maturity.
![WikiCity [Rome]](http://andreavaccari.com/blog/wp-content/themes/andvac-theme/images/wikicity_rome.gif)
